Wednesday, 23 October 2013

A couple of news items that recently caught my attention discussed backdoors found in network routers [1] [2]. I'll throw in something similar in case anyone is keeping track.

I picked up a Sunluxy CCTV DVR from ebay at the start of the year to record bluetits nesting in one of my bird boxes. Unfortunately both parents apparently succumbed to predation and the chicks perished but that is beside the point. The product itself was pretty good and unsurprisingly it has quite a few positive reviews on Amazon. Nothing unusual so far.

One thing that did annoy me slightly though was the way videos had to be exported. You had to manually export videos (to USB) on a day by day basis, which isn't really what I was after. I'd rather pull recordings for the last week or so over the network in one go but this didn't seem like an existing feature. Oh well, time to have a poke around!

Tuesday, 22 October 2013

If you've been playing with a Fubarino SD, then you probably already know it's designed to be Arduino code compatible (as long as direct hardware access is avoided). However, I wanted to do something else with it, using MPLABX (The Microchip IDE). This is where things get a bit more interesting, and I haven't figured out all the answers yet. Basically, I wanted to update the firmware on a Roland Juno-D keyboard, and wanted some way of sending the data over.

Sunday, 20 October 2013

Once upon a time, I purchase a CurrentCost power monitoring device and base station. The monitoring device watches the output of my electricity meter, and the base station displays the information and sends an XML stream over a serial port. It works. However CurrentCost also produce some digital development boards and I picked up three, as it seemed a good idea at the time. Sadly, what I didn't realise (although, it was documented...) is that the boards send a signal indicating 500W consumption when you short the input channel, and a signal indicating 0W consumption when you leave the input channel open. Now, for some people, that's great, but I wasn't happy with it what seemed to be pretty basic operation. I thought to myself, "I'm sure we can get this thing to do a lot more!", so I set about trying to do just that.

If you haven't come across the Currentcost digital development boards before, they look like this: